


Screwtape in San Francisco

by cptsdcarlosdevil



Category: Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-07 17:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12845658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cptsdcarlosdevil/pseuds/cptsdcarlosdevil
Summary: A modern set of Screwtape Letters.





	1. Chapter 1

My dear Persclaw--

Spare me your twaddle. Your patient is an atheistic, adulterous, fornicating sapphist, is she? I hope that you aren’t proud of yourself. 

For some time the policy of Our Father Below has been heresy, atheism and ignorance. Our successes have been greatest among the religious, most of whom believe God is a sort of bearded therapist who wants His creatures to be happy and nice to each other and to work on their low self-esteem. There is no consciousness of guilt or sin or the need for redemption. Heresy runs rampant. Many are genuinely ignorant that their gluttony and sloth could be considered sins!

The kinder and more honest humans (not that any human is ever really honest) recognize this as the claptrap it is. Some find true religion and are lost to us, but many are wooed away by Dawkins or Hitchens or someone of that sort. There is a victory in this. The human is kept safe from the sacraments, which give such a repulsive strength and fortitude to the human soul. There is no need to fear the company of mature Christians, who may spur the human to a quite undesirable level of self-examination. 

But you see the problem. The Enemy, with his despicable “justice,” has found a way to have it both one way and the other. Fornication, adultery, and atheism are grave sins, but damnation requires more than gravity: the sin must be performed with full knowledge and consent of the will. Many times a young tempter has thought his patient well in hand, cultivated her habits of blasphemy and pornography while ignoring the pernicious charity growing up in her heart, only to find her, with a single moment of grace, swept away by the Enemy. 

And we cannot even get the patient to read books that would convince her fornication is a sin, for fear she would repent and convert!

The Enemy is as promiscuous with grace as your patient is with spreading her legs. He shows no discretion, no fastidiousness; he grants forgiveness at every half-hearted repentance, endurance and strength at every mumbled plea to I-know-there’s-nothing-out-there-but. He accepts as praise the wonder in the atheist’s soul at a sunset or a poem or a baby’s smile. 

One of the wiser humans said that they know where the church is, but they do not know where it is not. The Enemy conceals His plans from us as much as from the humans, but with the benefit of our spiritual sight we may see how spread out the church militant truly is and how surprising are some of His greatest warriors. You would think the humans would realize, given His comments on the publicans and the tax collectors, and His explicit statement that the saved would be surprised that they had fed and clothed Jesus himself. Fortunately, even if humans read their holy book, they only rarely comprehend it.

The AIDS crisis was simply a tragedy. Homosexual after homosexual, patients we thought we had safely damned through the sins of the flesh, discovering self-sacrifice and charity, fidelity and resignation. (Don’t believe that lie the propaganda department tells the humans, that avoidance of adultery is the sum and total of fidelity in a relationship.) Why, a patient of mine, one damned through his anger far more than his lust, suddenly discovered righteous anger and started chaining himself to buildings and chanting about the CDC. Worst of all, it taught them that they could not rely on their own strength, and many turned instead to rely on the Enemy. Tragedy opened cracks in thousands of souls through which the Enemy could shine. It enrages me! I was barely comforted by the delightful crop of Christian hypocrites and Pharisees we had that year. 

So do not assume too quickly that because the patient is an atheist and a lesbian that matters are under control--

Your uncle,

Screwtape.


	2. Chapter 2

My dear Persclaw--

I note with pleasure the amount of time your patient spends arguing about politics on Twitter. Truly, the number of souls damned by social media makes it one of Our Father’s most useful inventions, next to the atom bomb and the mirror. 

Sloth has always been a troublesome sin, because the slothful patient is almost always aware that they  _ ought _ to be doing something worthwhile. We may convince a human to spend hours masturbating or napping or watching Netflix, but the entire time the human is aware that they would be happier and better-off if they instead played with their children or volunteered at a shelter or finished a novel they really like. With sloth as unpleasant as it is, the human is always at risk of repentance. 

The trick works best on the most idealistic humans, who could otherwise rise quite high in the Enemy’s service. The human may sincerely care about some worthy goal-- racial or gender equality, intellectual freedom, helping the poor, the preservation of Western civilization-- but we teach them they are advancing it by collecting and spreading trivia about the opinions of some celebrity or the dining-hall options of a college half a continent away. Since sloth, as always, makes them quite miserable, they believe they have offered a great sacrifice in service of their cause, and are correspondingly reluctant to do anything else to advance it. In the most advanced cases, the patient’s self-satisfaction may quash even unrelated seeds of charity that spring up in their heart.  

Use those wonderful words “staying informed” and “raising awareness”, and keep away from your patient’s mind any question of what good the information or awareness are supposed to do. Keep entirely from the patient’s mind the fact that two weeks from now no one will care about the current outrage. Never let the patient question whether they’d learn more if they’d spend the time they currently spend on Twitter reading a book or watching a documentary, for as soon as the question arises it is obvious that well-researched nonfiction by an expert is both more interesting and more informative than the rantings of some half-witted pseudojournalist. 

Not, of course, that the human would be able to concentrate on a book if they tried. The attention is like any other skill and must be honed. Concentrating on a serious, intellectual book after a steady diet of social media is like a sedentary man trying to lift a tree log or a politician attempting to tell the truth. With time, the patient’s mind will be inexorably drawn away from stillness, quiet and concentration towards the wonderful busyness and noise which drive out the Enemy.

Social media uses two of our best tools, the love of the Novel and the horror of Missing Out. Humans naturally desire the New, but they also naturally desire to rest and appreciate the Good Enough. A balance befits their limited nature, lacking the knowledge available to any spiritual being: they neither content themselves with the inadequate nor restlessly rove, forever unsatisfied with what is. We feed the pleasure the human takes in the New. Each 140 characters bring a new joke, a new tragedy, a new outrage; thus we teach them to crave variety, no matter how insipid, simply because it is varied. The patient loses their ability to concentrate on any intellectual work which requires them to have the same emotion for a whole paragraph. 

Alongside the love of the New comes the horror of Missing Out. The patient cannot bear to leave their phone unchecked or at home, lest something happen without them “being informed.” Many of my patients devote hours to patiently backreading all of their social media, while the dishes go unwashed and the daily charities go undone. A dinner with a loved one, a child showing their latest painting, a burst of artistic inspiration, each is interrupted by the buzz of the Infernal machine. If the Enemy calls the patient’s soul, simply have a notification go off, and the sunset or the burst of peace will be quite harmless. You see the game-- through the patient’s fear of Missing Out, they actually come to miss out on all that is good about life. Sloth ultimately is not just the misuse of time but the loss of the ability to not misuse time-- 

Your uncle,

Screwtape


	3. Chapter 3

My dear Persclaw--

Yes, Twitter is an excellent opportunity for attacks on the patient’s charity. 

Humans are innately both spiritual and physical. Their disgusting hybrid nature is often important to recall in tempting (loathe as I am to admit it), for it allows them to fall into many errors a purely spiritual being will not. As strange as you and I may find it, if the human cannot see the face of their opponent in argument, they will often  _ forget that their opponent is a fellow human at all. _

“How can they forget so obvious a truism?” you cry. They do, Persclaw, they do! 

Until relatively recently, nearly all humans could only argue with other humans face-to-face, and almost always with humans they knew. We had some luck with anonymous editorialists, Alexander Hamilton and the like, but their loyalty and self-sacrifice meant that with depressing regularity they escaped to the Enemy’s keeping. There are advantages to in-person argumentation, which I urge you not to neglect. The old dry bitter hatred barely felt as hatred can only be cultivated in a personal atmosphere.

Nevertheless, a face-to-face argument is always dangerous. At any moment the human may see the other human cringe with pain at a particularly devastating insult, and their self-satisfaction will instantly dissolve in a solvent of mercy and grief. The one will cry out in sorrow; the other in forgiveness; and years of hard work will disappear in a moment of redemption. 

On the Internet, even a quite empathetic patient may turn cruel. I have seen one of those simpering humans-- the kind who loves animals, cannot pass a baby without cooing and refuses to watch television news because it’s too upsetting-- mock another human for being weak enough to feel pain at an insult. In the old days we had to lure a patient deep into our service to commit that sin; today they are doing it for us. 

The patient’s desire to be part of the In Crowd can be used to encourage them into deeper cruelties. Give the human a social circle such that the more vicious the remark the more numerous the Likes the human can bask in. (It was a wonderful invention, the Like. In my day we often had to reward the humans for sin with things of value.) Allow the human to feel part of the group (always a strong motivation for any human) by insulting whomever the group is insulting. Keep quite far from the patient’s mind any idea of what it must  _ feel like  _ to have dozens if not hundreds of humans competing to see who can slander you the most eloquently; if such a thought does come up, tell the human not to “spoil the fun” or that the victim deserved it or that the other human is “butthurt,” a wonderful word which conceals the argument (obviously fallacious when brought to the human’s attention) that if you feel pain when I hurt you you deserve to be hurt.

Do not be satisfied with a cutting remark in response to another human’s commonplace stupidity or sin. Cultivate the patient’s hypocrisy, never letting them question whether they have done the thing they’ve criticized, or would have done it in the other human’s shoes. If at all possible, lead the patient to that excellent hobby, which brews such wonderful self-righteousness and thoughtlessness, of finding something foolish another human has said and mocking it as viciously as possible. And of course be quite careful that the patient fly into a rage any time these tactics are used against her--

Your uncle,

Screwtape. 

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank apprenticebard and comparativelysuperlative for their excellent beta for humor, Screwtapely tone, and religious orthodoxy. All remaining mistakes are my own.


End file.
